James Gunn—recently installed as the co-head of Warner Bros. Discovery’s re-branded, soon-to-be-massively-reorganized DC Studios—issued a statement on social media today, responding to a story originally reported on yesterday by The Hollywood Reporter. Said story asserted that one of the casualties of Gunn and Peter Safran’s new approach to DC Comics movies (which the pair are still supposedly hammering out before presenting to top brass) was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 3, which Jenkins had submitted a treatment for recently, and which, per the story, Gunn and Safran had turned down, saying it didn’t match their still-developing plans for the franchise.
Gunn didn’t get into specifics with his response statement, but did state that, re: the THR story, “Some of it is true, some of it is half-true, some of it is not true, & some of it we haven’t decided yet whether it’s true or not.” Calling the planning period so far “fruitful,” Gunn went on to admit that he and Safran knew, going in, that there would “be an unavoidable transitional period as we moved into telling a cohesive story across film, TV, animation, and gaming.”
There are some fairly massive questions floating around DC Studios at the moment, most of them centered on how much of the existing framework of DCEU stories—which began with Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel in 2013, before attempting to build out into a Marvel-esque shared universe in the ensuing decade—will be retained in the transition. Gunn stated his commitment today “to build upon what has worked in DC so far & to help rectify what has not…We know we are not going to make every single person happy every step of the way, but we can promise everything we do is done in the service of the STORY & in the service of the DC CHARACTERS we know you cherish and we have cherished our whole lives.”
Gunn finished out his post with a call for patience as he and Safran continue to plan, followed by an Alex Ross painting of DC’s Justice League that certainly suggests that the comics’ most iconic characters—if not the actors, or the continuity that they’ve had so far in the Warner Bros. filmography—will persist as he and Safran chart their new course.
